Burn Notice: Steven "Destiny" Bonnell II
Part 1: The truth about my friend Steve.
The internet's short-fused firebrand, Steven Bonnell II (AKA Destiny), is many things. A pioneering political streamer, a Twitter antagonist, and a deceiver. He has inspired numerous hit pieces and manifestos that try to pin him as racist, transphobic, and misogynistic. Steven is ofted derided as a relentless bully who gives more time to airing personal grievances against political opponents than the issues he claims to champion.
These fabrications, exaggerations, and gossip have contributed to his success as a manipulative subversive.
For the better of 12 years, Steven has been more than an agent of chaos for several online communities. Between the summer of 2011 through October 2019, Destiny worked as an agent for intelligence services in the United States and, unknown to him at the time, North Korea. As an agent of the NSA, he aided in deploying malicious code against a target believed, to him at the time, to be the North Korean intelligence services. As a joint CIA/FBI informant, collected information on various public figures in new media and online politics. And in several cases, he has attempted to subvert growing political movements under direction and of his own accord. All while growing his presence as a Starcraft figurehead and, later, a prominent online pundit in online politics.
Note: In espionage, an agent isn't "James Bond" or the spies directly employed by intelligence services. James Bond is an amalgamation of multiple roles, often executed by more than one entity or branch of government. In the case of this matter, most of the government personnel involved are what the CIA calls Case Officers. They work on behalf of their respective agency, identifying intelligence leads and opportunities and recruiting personnel with particular skillsets, access, and/or vulnerabilities that make them valuable. Those recruits are called "agents."
An Unspoken Sadness
It is well known to those in the online politics world that Destiny is of Cuban descent. His mother, Mary Bonnell, is a Cuban immigrant, staunchly anti-left in her politics, and a United States Air Force veteran. Steven grew up with a similar political bent, where for many years he modulated between staunch Reagan Republican and devout libertarian.
What isn't known is that her son's great-uncle on his grandmother's side was Pepe San Román,
commander of Brigade 2506, during the Bay of Pigs invasion. A former Cuban lieutenant colonel, Pepe spent significant time training with the American military pre-Castro. Acquiring an appreciation for U.S. democracy and building ties with senior U.S. military officials.
In November 1959, he fled Cuba for Miami, joining a growing population of refugees
where the desire to retake their homeland ran strong. It was here that Pepe, along with 10 other former Cuban officers, met CIA recruiters. With his military experience and desire for retribution against El Jefe Maximo, the group was brought on board to join the covert precursors to
Operation Mongoose.
San Román's final operation was to experience devastating defeat during the slaughter at the Bay of Pigs. On top of bungled planning and internal strife at the CIA, vital air support had been cut by President Kennedy at the eleventh hour. After three days of disaster-fraught fighting, the Americans left Pepe and his men for dead, knee-deep in swampland, as he radioed CIA commanders in vain for assistance. The ground forces later dispersed into the jungle, where Pepe was captured 5 days later and interrogated before being released to the American government. Publicly heralded as a hero by President Kennedy, Pepe was haunted by the failure of the operation and the loss of his compatriots until September 10th, 1989, when he took his own life.
While Mary Bonnell's anti-leftist jingoism sculpted Steven's political psyche during his youth, this Uncle he never knew would leave him open to the first steps down a path of covert action.
Korean Interlude
In July 2011, Steven was the world's first full-time streamer and a household name in Starcraft II when he was approached by none other than Chris Metzen, Creative Director of Blizzard's World of Warcraft. The meeting took place at a hotel bar on the second day of Major League Gaming's Pro Circuit event at the Anaheim Convention Center.
Metzen, at the time, was acting as an agent on behalf of an NSA analyst named Colin Reed, who led a Top Secret program called "TORQUE."
Reed reached Metzen through a mutual friend and former Blizzard colleague "Walter," an engineer who had played a key role in developing Blizzard's battle.net software. Walter left for the NSA in 2008 where he met Reed. Metzen was offered $200,000 in exchange for assistance with project TORQUE. The objective was to covertly deploy software behind the South Korean national firewall system to "surveil North Korean operatives south of the DMZ." As Reed explained during their meeting, "VPN's are not an option." At the time, South Korea's National Intelligence Service (NIS) aggressively monitored (or outright owned) nearly all global VPN ingress/egress points. Chris would use his access at Blizzard to merge code into an upcoming StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty multiplayer update, obfuscating the source of the code for deniability (should anything be discovered). But there was one other catch.
The program would have to be executed by a designated account to avoid heuristic detection, anomalizing the payload delivery.
Reed, an avid League of Legends player, had the idea of using someone in the rising "esports" scene to deliver the payload. It was Metzen who recommended Bonnell.
Metzen knew Steven had a hard life working dead-end restaurant and carpet cleaning jobs before streaming. And though his stock was rising, Steven was barely past 20 with an unborn son on the way. This left Bonnell in a prime position to be approached by Metzen.
At MLG, Metzen offered Bonnell $50K (provided by Reed) to execute a particular series of moves on the game from within South Korea. Bonnell, thrilled at the prospect of operating as an agent, especially against such a storied enemy of the West, immediately accepted. Steven and Metzen met again in August to discuss the plan further. Steven recommended his "infestor hit squad" as the load sequence for the program and the deployment of infested marines as the execution sequence.
The plan moved forward. Though, Reed was wary that Steven’s sudden arrival in South Korea would not provide adequate cover. To Metzen, this meant cover from North Korea. To Reed, it was the U.S. government. The last thing Reed needed was the CIA’s counterintelligence service or the NSA piqueing interest in Mr. Bonnell.
As it turned out, Chris Reed was a North Korean mole within the NSA, leveraging Metzen and soon Bonnell under false pretenses. Chris was a four-year-old refugee from North Korea when he found himself in the adoptive arms of Harold and Katherine Reed. Two senior State Department officials from Boca Raton, Florida.
Harold traveled with them from one duty station to the next before graduation, where he enlisted as a signals analyst in the Marines. After reaching the rank of sergeant, he went on to commission and earn the rank of major. But as a freshly minted lieutenant studying Korean at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, he was approached by North Korean operatives at a well-known deli near the base in Monterey. Reed was discovered and interrogated aggressively in 2013, but his motives for cooperating remain unknown to this day.
STANZA was the actual name of Project TORQUE. A North Korean/Chinese/Russian joint collaboration on a Stuxnet-like worm intended to target South Korean government officials' personal devices in the hopes of accessing secure systems through device cross-contamination (i.e. plugging an unsecured personal cell phone, USB, etc., into a government device). The intent was to obtain material for blackmail, leverage that could undermine US/SK relations, and open other doors for further exploitation.
Reed, through FSB (successor to the KGB) contact Dmitri Mikhailov, had pushed Destiny's team owner, Simon Boudreault, to ensure Destiny received a team-funded
trip to Korea with proper public fanfare. Boudreault, who later
disappeared in 2013 with thousands in player salaries and winnings, was in severe loan debt with a Russian titanium oligarch. Mikhailov ameliorated the issue in exchange for Destiny's trip to Seoul, which Boudreault brokered with South Korean team StarTale.
The plan was simple. Destiny would execute "hits" in game with three Infestors - worm like creatures that burrow, shoot fungus webbing, and unload eggs that hatch into parasitic marines - against his online opponents. Doing so would trigger the code to deploy a portion of itself to the target system. With enough subsequent deployments, the code would be compiled and executed on a covertly deployed bastion host at the edge of the NIS firewall. Once completed, a limiter would prevent the code from executing on Bonnell's account. The February release of
patch 1.4.3 removed the code and erased all traces of Bonnell's activities.
The code wouldn’t be discovered by the South Korean’s until March 9th, 2013. Reed was apprehended within the week, traveling through Prague en route to Moscow.
When the CIA followed Reed’s tracks back to Bonnell, they discovered he was already in the FBI’s database. A series of malicious prank calls from online stalkers had lead to a formal investigation. It was this series of events that would lead to Bonnell working for years as a joint FBI/CIA informant and subversive. Friendships, fueds, and questionable career choices would all be the affected by - or a deliberate construct for - his objectives as an agent.
In part two, the last part of this mess, I’ll discuss how the public incidents and theatrics we have all witnessed and the counterintelligence subplot that underscores most of them.
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